White House Staffer Resigns Post

The White House’s director of “rapid response” resigned Monday in what White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterized as a “mutual decision.”

Andy Hemming’s task was to scour the internet looking for stories that reflected well on the administration and push them out to a list of of approximately 1,000 reporters, congressional aides and other “influencers,” the U.K. Daily Mail reported.

Sanders told Politico that it was a “(m)utual decision that he could best help promote the president’s agenda on the outside. Andy is smart and very talented and we wish him all the best.”

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Hemming, 31, served as director of research for Trump’s presidential campaign before coming to the White House.

Prior to that, he was an adviser for research with the Republican National Committee.

“There’s so much good news that’s coming out of this administration, that we have to continue pushing all of these positive messages ourselves to remind people there’s a lot going on,” Miller told Politico.

Sanders had previously spoken positively of Hemming’s job performance, saying, “Andy does an incredible job of finding those hidden gems and trying to amplify those positive messages.”

She added, “He’s quick, and I would say he has a very good pulse on what’s hot, but also on what wasn’t hot but should be.”

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While Trump frequently rails against “fake news,” many of the stories Hemming promoted to his list came from mainstream outlets, including The New York Times, according to the Washington Examiner.

“They don’t always get it wrong,” Sanders said of mainstream news outlets like the Times and CNN. “But for every one good story we push out, there are probably 150 really bad process stories, or hit pieces, on the administration. We think a lot of times, the stories that we push out have been given very little coverage.”

Hemming joins a list of departures from the White House press office during the opening months of the Trump administration, including communication directors Mike Dubke and Anthony Scaramucci, and press secretary Sean Spicer.